THIS FACE MIGHT NOT BE MINE

Author’s Note: Hi there! How’s it going? covid-19 came to kick our asses, huh? I hope you’re taking the necessary precautions to stay safe. Enjoy this personal essay I wrote some time back.

THIS FACE MIGHT NOT BE MINE

My body is good. I have a broad chest with thick arms and thin legs with very dark skin but there is something wrong with my face. It’s roundish. I have a huge nose, my eyes are wide apart and my dark upper lip is bigger than my pink lower lip but that’s not the problem. It’s the entirety of these individual features.
I meet new people all the time and almost always, someone seems to recognize me or knows me from somewhere. The most recent being a man who recently came to our congregation. He claimed that I looked very much like someone he had known. Never mind the fact that I’d never meet him. Some time before this, during my internship, another employee was confident that we’d met before. A month before this, at a family friend’s wedding, a man waved and walked over to me with a countenance of someone who knew me as a friend. I tried my best to convince him I wasn’t who he thought I was. My parents and my 3 siblings had a laugh when we returned home. I wasn’t amused. I guess you now get what I mean about something being wrong with my face.

Though my face is very unremarkable it seems to belong to other people and overtime this has made me uncomfortable with my face.

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Another thing is that my face seems to look younger than I am. I am 22 but this year alone I’ve had friends and strangers congratulate me on writing B.E.C.E, finishing Senior High and securing admission at the University of Ghana (this happened on Friday last week). The truth couldn’t be further; I ‘ve already graduated with a degree in Education and Psychology. In my second year at the university, I decided to grow an afro and a beard so I would look older. Let’s just say genetics and how ugly I began to look stopped me.
This same face has made people question even my name. Personally, I questioned my name once when I was younger .I wanted to be called Jonathan, it was the name of one of the male characters in a telenovela I watched. So I asked my dad why I didn’t have an English name. He asked me whether I’d heard a white person called ‘Kofi’ or ‘Adwoa’ and continued “So what do you want to take their names for?” I never brought it up again.

When the residents of Ogbojo questioned my name they said I looked too much like a girl. So according to them ‘Kofi’ didn’t fit me. I was almost 6 at that time. Perhaps that is why they started calling me by my middle name Konadu which is unisex among Akans. Fast forward to Senior High School and my classmates now call me by my surname- Berko. According to them, my face looks too innocent and too young for me to be a Babone or Okyinkyin. Both are mmrane of my first name Kofi. And they wouldn’t call me Konadu because according to them, I also didn’t fit in with the two other Konadus who were class clowns. As a result of these occurrences, I hardly take pictures. Aside family photos, I have very few pictures from Junior High and no pictures from Senior High School.
Since I don’t have an English name, I usually get annoyed when people ask me what my ‘English’ name or ‘Christian’ name is, from St. Peter’s Mission School through PRESEC, Legon to University of Ghana. I would mostly reply with a question, “Is this England, Do you mean Hebrew name?” or an ordinary blank stare. I could tell you I am indifferent to these questions nowadays but that would be a lie.

Last month, I travelled to Kumasi in the Ashanti region. My co-workers and I were on our way back to the bus, when a man called out to them to buy his wares completely ignoring me. So I asked him in Asante Twi whether he thought I didn’t deserve to wear any of the sunglasses he had arranged on a table and he was visibly amazed. According to him, I looked like someone from a French speaking country either Benin or Togo. How he came to that conclusion I will never know. I could’ve have taken it as a compliment since I had recently started learning French but I felt insulted and ashamed because I was on the land where my ancestors had lived and still lived and he couldn’t recognise this. After many experiences with this face I guess I shouldn’t have thought much to this but this incident still plagues me.
Sometimes I feel like faces of other people have been slapped onto mine. It is scary to think that something that should be solely yours seems to be possessed by others.
With this face and the problems it has caused me, one thing I fear is people looking at my face and declaring that I don’t look like a writer that I cannot be a writer. You could say this doesn’t matter, that I should just keep writing or that writers don’t have a look but I think they do. Look at the faces of Chinua Achebe, NoVoilet Bulawayo, Chigozie Obioma and Ruby Yayra Goka and you notice a resemblance. There is a wisdom in their face that is acknowledged by those who read their work. But will people acknowledge me as a writer if this wisdom cannot be found on this face? This face that it isn’t mine?
All that being said, I think there are good things about my face since it still has secrets that people cannot assume, that my mouth enjoys Jollof and Nuhuu than any other food, that my eyes think Sense8 is the greatest TV series ever made or that my nose hates the smell of fried fish.
I hope my real face, which doesn’t and shouldn’t resemble strangers shows itself soon because if these ‘facial problems’ continue, I will probably have to have facial reconstruction done. Maybe that will solve my problems.